The recent revolution in technologies for dynamically sharing virtualizations of hardware resources, software, and information storage across networks has increased the reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of computing. More specifically, the ability to provide on demand virtual computing resources and storage through the advent of virtualization has enabled consumers of processing resources and storage to flexibly structure their computing and storage costs in response to immediately perceived computing and storage needs. Virtualization allows customers to purchase processor cycles and storage at the time of demand, rather than buying or leasing fixed hardware in provisioning cycles that are dictated by the delays and costs of manufacture and deployment of hardware. Rather than depending on the accuracy of predictions of future demand to determine the availability of computing and storage, users are able to purchase the use of computing and storage resources on a relatively instantaneous as-needed basis.
Virtualized computing environments are frequently supported by block-based storage. Such block-based storage provides a storage system that is able to interact with various computing virtualizations through a series of standardized storage calls that render the block-based storage functionally agnostic to the structural and functional details of the volumes that it supports and the operating systems executing on the virtualizations to which it provides storage availability. However, as network transmission capabilities increase, along with greater processing capacity for virtualized resources, I/O demands upon block-based storage may grow. If I/O demands exceed the capacity of block-based storage to service requests, then latency and/or durability of block-based storage performance for virtualized computing resources suffer.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that the embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.